


(b)ring me up

by mangofree



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Because of Reasons, Capitalism, Disk Drunk | Infected Adora (She-Ra), F/F, Hotels, Punk Catra (She-Ra), adora is drunk and gay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:14:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21806473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mangofree/pseuds/mangofree
Summary: aka, capitalism has seized she-raHotel clerk Catra has gotten away from her past. As in, literally moved away. But a new guest and old friend threatens her attempt at a completely new slate...Her workplace benefits don't cover nearly enough of the shit she goes through, but oh well.
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Adora/Glimmer (She-Ra)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 60





	1. let our hearts run round in circles

**Author's Note:**

> Starring:  
> Ex-alcoholic Catra  
> Loose Adora (tm)  
> Mom-mode Glimmer  
> and hijinks!

The clock on the wall was broken.

Catra spun in her ratty grey wheely chair, perching on the edge where there weren’t any suspicious stains, and made a mental note to tell her manager— Scorpia— about the clock later.

Oh, who was she kidding. She’d probably forget it later anyways. She pulled herself over to her desk, carefully avoiding the patch of tan carpet that was just-fuzzy-enough to trap the wheel of the chair, which she’d learned the hard way before.

She plucked a yellow post-it from somewhere in the cluttered mass of administrative business on her desk and wrote:

**clock broken. tell scorpia.**

She stuck it on the garishly-yellow wall behind her, hoping the termites weren’t _that_ fast enough to somehow abduct it before the end of her shift.

Despite her decrepit working conditions, Catra had to admit she’d scored when she landed this job through Entrapta. It was an ideal position— weird hours for her already-weird sleeping schedule, an almost complete lack of customers (the ones that did come in were sufficiently entertaining, anyway), and far, far away from Spinner’s foster home and daycare center.

Hell, if anyone she recognized walked in here, sobriety be damned, she’d treat herself to a bottle of vintage gin. As if that could possibly happen, anyway.

She sighed and glanced at the time on her cracked phone screen: 1:58 AM. Only four more hours of boredom.

Normally she would’ve brought her sketchbook, or just played some stupid game on her phone, but her sketchbook was undergoing review at art school, and her phone was hanging onto dear life at 8 percent battery— she still needed to call an uber or something so she could get home.

Catra was debating making tally marks on the wall for each hour more she’d have to stay, but her thoughts were interrupted by someone— no, two people— walking through the front door.

One was short and had obnoxiously pink hair, and when she threw her head back to laugh, the light seemed to glint off of specks of… craft glitter? Maybe she’d just come from a drag show.

The other wore a red bomber jacket and had blond hair scooped into a ponytail, with bangs bobby-pinned back into a stupid, familiar poof above her forehead.

_Wait, what?_

Catra squinted, doubting her ever-excellent eyesight for the first time.

That was _definitely_ the jacket she’d seen so many times in the wash, slung over her best friend’s shoulder, the same one she’d used as a blanket during too-cold nights, the same one she’d helped sew patches onto to make room for the growth that came with age.

And her eyes. The exact same shade of steel blue that she’d used to make up stories about in her head, squinted into a smile at something glitter girl said.

_Adora?_

But… how? Why?

Catra fidgeted agitatedly with a pen on her desk. She _had_ to devise some sort of way to get answers while still maintaining her professionalism.

Looked like she was getting that bottle of gin after all.

First, she needed to make sure Adora wouldn't recognize her.

Congratulating herself internally for her quick thinking, Catra opened a drawer and put on Scorpia’s blue Ray-Bans. Objectively, Catra’s most distinctive feature was her mismatched eye colors: one was blue, and the other was an amber-y brown. It would be a dead giveaway if Adora noticed them.

She tossed on her new baseball cap for good measure, turning the brim forward. Baseball caps were kind of her signature too, but eh. She usually wore them backwards.

Just in time, Adora and the other girl arrived at Catra’s underwhelming front desk.

“Welcome to the Horde Inn. How can I help you?” Catra asked in the sweetest tones she could manage.

“Yeah um, me and my friend,” the glittery one said, gesturing to Adora, “Would like a cheap room, please. For tonight only.”

Catra checked the bookings. The cheapest double room available was infested; the alternative was a single. “Sorry, it’ll have to be one bed…”

Adora smiled deviously, slinging an arm around Glitter’s shoulder. “That’ll do just fine.”

Maybe it was because Catra hadn’t seen Adora for awhile, but she was acting _strange._ She had never even tried to be a smooth talker before, and the way she swayed unsteadily on her feet definitely wasn’t the stance she’d acquired over years of sparring with Huntara, the old self-defense teacher.

“Yep, okay, anyway,” Glitter said, turning a color that faintly matched her hair, “How much would that be?”\

“$80 a night,” Catra replied.

“Alright, I’ll cover it.”

As Glitter was fishing around for her wallet in a sparkly fanny pack slung over her shoulder, Catra saw a prime opportunity to finally get some answers

.

Adora seemed preoccupied with playing with Glitter’s hair, so that was one thing Catra didn’t have to worry about.

“Say, is your friend alright?” She asked, voice dripping with concern. “Were y’all out late partying?”

Glitter sighed and rolled her eyes. “This dumbass thought she could beat Sea Hawk— he’s this dude who’s like, drunk 24/7— at a drinking contest at his own bar.” She paused, tapping her chin with one hand and continuing to dig through the fanny pack with the other. “Actually, no one can ever tell if he’s drunk or sober. Maybe he just acts really drunk all the time naturally.”

Catra made a mental note to look up this Sea Hawk dude later. Maybe he’d be an interesting character. Maybe she could get some free booze out of it.

“Aww. It’s a good thing she has a friend like you who has her back,” Catra said, a bit too sharply. She continued with a cough and a smile, her fingers clicking away at the keyboard as she entered Glitter’s booking.

Luckily, her sparkly guest seemed to not have noticed. Triumphantly, she held her card aloft, the her VISA logo somehow blinding in the fluorescent lights. “AHA! Found it!”

Catra let out a chuckle, a sincere one. “Relax, missy. I still need your names first.”

“Ugh,” Glitter sighed. “Do you need our full names?” She set her card down on the counter, crossing her arms.

“Yes…?” That was an odd thing to be touchy about. Besides, Catra was only following hotel protocol.

“Fine. Glimmer Brightmoon, Adora Grayskull.”

Catra would’ve laughed at the fact that she’d almost gotten Glitter’s name right, or felt some sort of satisfied confirmation that the drunk one was actually Adora, but it was Glitter’s last name that caught her attention.

Glimmer _Brightmoon._ Of _Brightmoon Industries,_ only the biggest manufacturing corporation in all of Etheria. They were mostly known for their high quality furniture and home appliances, but they had branched out to other fields as well, like electricity, groceries, delivery services… They had it all.

Its competitor was Horde Incorporated, a large-scale real estate agency also looking to branch out into different businesses. The company that happened to own this backwater hotel.

If Glitter was actually part of the family that owned her company, then why would she bother staying in such a crappy place? Why would she stay at a place owned by her family’s _competitor?_ This kid had to be loaded! It made no sense!

Catra swallowed her questions with great difficulty. Normally she didn’t care much for hotel policy, but it would be too suspicious of her if she asked.

“Right… Miss Glimmer.” Catra took Glitter’s card and swiped it. “Just sign here, and here’s your room key. The room’s on the fourth floor, you can take the elevator around the corner.”

Glitter signed the receipt with a flourish and took the key, twirling the loop around her finger. “Thank you! Have a nice night!”

Adora made a peace sign, leaning more of her weight into her friend.

They stumbled out of the lobby in a zigzag walk, and soon they were in the elevator and gone from the lobby.

Catra whistled out a breath and kicked her feet up on her desk, simultaneously tossing the cap off her head and putting the sunglasses back in their drawer.

So Adora, the one who’d always been so prim and perfect, had gotten wasted and basically delivered herself unknowingly to Catra’s doorstep. Well, her workplace’s doorstep, but still.

What was she doing here?


	2. in which glimmer regrets her life choices

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> rip glimmer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hoo boy its been a minute lmao  
> ill upload weekly from now on, since i do have a backlog and because quarantine is a thing!

“Oh, I KNEW something freaking HAD TO HAPPEN, didn’t it? Thanks, got anything else for us, UNIVERSE??”

Glimmer, breathing hard, paced circles around the cramped elevator space, fingers knotted through her hair. Clearly, yelling wasn’t going to help. 

“Chill ooout,” Adora giggled, somehow lounging on the floor with her arms behind her head. “It’s a nice room, Glimmer.”

“Adora. This is the elevator,” Glimmer said, waving her arms above her head. “We are stuck. In the el-ev-at-or.” She stopped pacing, instead going over to check the floor buttons. Maybe there would be a call button, or a helpline…

Nope. Nothing. 

“Oh, we shouldn’tve stayed here, we are going to DIE and my mom is going to kill me.” She slumped down against the wall opposite Adora, dragging her hands down her face dramatically.

“Haven’t you got like, a phone, or something?” Adora said, now apparently finally in the mood to be helpful.

“It died when Bow took the group selfie with Perfuma’s brownies,” Glimmer said defeatedly. 

“Oh! Those! Did you have any?” 

“Nah, they smelled weird.”

“Yeah, they tasted pretty weird too. All herb-y… maybe there was perfume in them.” Adora illustrated the hypothetical scent with bastardized imitations of Perfuma’s yoga hand motions. 

The corners of Glimmer’s mouth twisted in thought. Herb-y brownies… 

Oh. Oh shit. She hadn’t had any, but there was a good chance those weren’t regular brownies.

“Adora, how many of those brownies did you have?” she asked carefully.

Adora scrunched her nose up and began counting on her fingers. “One, two, three... oh no, just one,” she laughed. “It wasn’t much… I’m still hungry.”

Glimmer’s tightly crossed fingers untwisted and curled into fists. “Oh, great! Just wonderful! So on top of being borderline blackout drunk, you decided to go for the pot brownies too."

Adora’s eyes glistened with sudden tears under the fluorescent lights.

Glimmer quickly waved her hands in an attempt to placate her. “It’s just… tomorrow is gonna be hell for you, jeez. And I’m worried,” she said apologetically. “I shouldn’t have let you get out of control.”

Adora sniffed with the force of a vacuum cleaner. “I’m fiiiine. I just feel a bit weird, that’s all.” She tried to prop herself up, swayed on her arm under her own weight, and laid back down. 

Glimmer pinched the bridge of her nose and exhaled slowly in an perfectly uncanny imitation of her mother. “Okay, so—”

She was interrupted by the sudden ding of the elevator. The floor jerked and groaned under them both, finally free from the perpetual suspension.

“Yay! We’re moving!” Adora rolled over to Glimmer’s wall and put her head in her ever-patient friend’s lap. 

Glimmer flushed bright red and stood up, pulling Adora with her. Being trapped in an elevator for eternity might not kill her tonight, but her poor lesbian heart still had a good chance.

“Yep, come on, let’s get you to bed.”

Glimmer and Adora stumbled out of the elevator and down the hall, Glimmer’s wedges clacking in unevenly carpeted areas of the floor. With Adora’s weight on her, she fumbled with the keys and stuck them in with great difficulty, twisting and jiggling them to coax the door open.

After a bit of struggling the door fell open, and they crashed in with the force of a two-lesbian battering ram. 

The room was dingy and the color palette was simply awful— a far cry from the immaculately designed rooms of Brightmoon hotels. Her mother would’ve been outraged, which was exactly why Glimmer had chosen to stay here. 

Adora immediately flopped onto what seemed like very hastily made, passably clean bedsheets, dragging Glimmer on top of her with a thump. 

“Adora! Would you please—” Glimmer tried to wiggle her arms free, with no success. “Let go of me?” Even in her compromised state, Adora was as strong as a vice.

“Glimmer,” Adora said, suddenly sounding like she was about to cry again. “Don't go.”

Okay, harmless flirty Adora was easier to deal with than childhood trauma-riden Adora. Glimmer sighed defeatedly. “No, I won’t. But what I do want to do is help you get to bed, okay?”

“That was Catra, down there. I know her. I know her and I left her, and I feel like shit, because I made her feel like shit. You know?” Adora rambled. Glimmer hadn’t the slightest clue what she was talking about, but let her continue. “And she probably still hates me, and I can’t do anything about it and it’s the worst possible time to see her because I’m out of my mind right now and—” she took a shaky breath. 

Glimmer thought she might continue, but she just held onto her and sobbed quietly. 

Well, since Glimmer was practically paralyzed, she didn’t have much of a choice in trying to deescalate the situation or attempting to comfort her in a more advantageous position. But eventually Adora’s grip slackened, and Glimmer was able to slide free of her grasp. 

Her friend had fallen fast asleep, splayed on her back with her ponytail messed up beyond repair and her face still streaked with tears and snot. Not the most glamorous situation in which Glimmer had seen her, but definitely one of the most intimate. Glimmer brushed her own rumpled clothes down and checked Adora’s breathing— steady and stable, not in medical danger, at least. 

Yeah, tomorrow would definitely be hell for her. 

Glimmer made a mental note to ask about this “Catra” person at the checkout desk. Actually, maybe even better, she could ask Catra directly— it wouldn’t even have to get Adora involved in her old mess.

Anyway, though, she had to get ready for bed.

**Author's Note:**

> i've got some chapters in backup, but we'll see about writing more if people read this :)


End file.
